


YOU CAN'T ARREST THE MAYOR!

by grainjew



Series: there we were, the three of us (threads of crimson, silver, and gold) [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: 5 Things, And I Guess That Someone Is Me !!!, And That Sucks, F/M, If Oda Isnt Going To Give Us Rouge Backstory SOMEONE Clearly Has To, Mayor Rouge, Multi, Not Navigationally Though She Cant Read A Compass To Save Her Life, Physically. And Financially. And Politically., Rayleigh Is Done With Everything, Rouge Can Kick Your Ass, Rouge Is Also Done With Everything But Is Slightly More Snarky About It, Spontaneously-Appearing Children, Why Does Rayleigh Have So Many Jobs On This Ship, antics, cause we know like NOTHING about rouge, dont worry, rated T because rouge likes to swear, the romance is so minimal it counts as gen, this thing is like 95 percent headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 08:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14912321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: Five interludes in Portgas D Rouge's life, including that one time she jumped out a window.“So, can either of you navigate for shit?” asked Roger, the day after he had recruited Rayleigh. They were out in open sea, the sky stretched out like a vast blue bubble over their heads.“I can run a store,” said Rouge. She shrugged. “Never been out of the Polestar Islands before now.”“You mean to say we're outside sight of land and I'm the best navigator you've got.” Rayleigh's voice was flat in a kind of incredulous disbelief.Rouge, who had known Roger for all of four days and was already used to his bullshit, thought Rayleigh should really not be shocked.





	YOU CAN'T ARREST THE MAYOR!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallingwish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingwish/gifts).



> i know i dedicate all my op fics to connie fallingwish but this one is especially for her; it only exists at all because of all the hilarious conversations we’ve had about what rouge got up to in all the years before her death and i am forever grateful

**1\. Rouge is a pirate apparently**

Portgas D Rouge had never really intended on piracy, but the lure of someone with the same oddity in his name as her was too much to resist. (Rayleigh came later, although only by three days. She held this fact over his head for the next three decades.)

At first it was just the three of them in the small sailboat Roger and Rouge stole on their way out of Loguetown and the dinghy Roger met Rayleigh in an island later, which Rayleigh never did say if he actually owned. Roger’s suggestion that they “turn the world upside-down” seemed pretty far-fetched from that vantage point, especially given… well:

“So, can either of you navigate for shit?” asked Roger, the day after he had recruited Rayleigh. They were out in open sea, the sky stretched out like a vast blue bubble over their heads.

“I can run a _store_ ,” said Rouge. She shrugged. “Never been out of the Polestar Islands before now.”

“You mean to say we're outside sight of land and _I'm_ the best navigator you've got.” Rayleigh's voice was flat in a kind of incredulous disbelief.

Rouge, who had known Roger for all of four days and was already used to his bullshit, thought Rayleigh should really not be shocked.

“Oh, cool, you can navigate?” Roger's face lit up in a gleeful grin. “You're our navigator now, Rayleigh!”

“But I _can't_ —”

“Rouge, you can be the bursar!” continued Roger, ignoring Rayleigh's sputtering protests about his lack of navigational skills. “And I'm the captain, of course!”

Somehow, it worked out exactly like Roger said it would, even though Rayleigh spent the next five years complaining about how they ought to get a better navigator until he finally threw his hands up and learned the damn trade for real. In the meantime he also became Vice-Captain because he was secretly an overachiever and also because Rouge wasn’t touching the job with a ten-foot pole. And they got new crewmembers, and a ship, none of whom got desensitized to Roger's Rogerness quite so quickly as the original two.

Business as usual for the Roger Pirates.

Why did Rouge commit to this again?

 

**2\. Rouge is not a babysitter**

Thirty or so years into their piracy career, children spontaneously appeared on the ship. Well, technically, it wasn’t _quite_ spontaneous, but Rouge definitely wasn’t consulted on this development. Nobody was, because the rest of the crew was not informed there were stowaways at all until Roger’s heart had already been thoroughly melted and they had been welcomed on the ship.

As it turned out, Shanks and Buggy were little menaces. Especially Shanks. Buggy at least helped Rouge with her gardening (nobody understood just how difficult keeping up flower beds on a pirate ship was!) and she got great amusement out of his stories of buried treasure even if he _was_ talking out of his ass half of the time. Most of the time. All of the time.

Okay, fine, she very quickly developed a massive soft spot for Buggy. It was only fair, really, because Roger just as quickly developed a just as massive soft spot for Shanks.

Rayleigh, as the neutral party, logically became the center of Buggy and Shanks’s competitions for attention. Like any sensible person, he hated it. _Unlike_ any sensible person, Roger immediately put Rayleigh in charge of the children. (“They like you so much! It’s perfect!”)

Rouge was not surprised at the declaration, because this was Roger they were talking about, and the day he made a sensible decision was the day Rouge met a Sea King that didn’t want to kill her. Rouge was also not surprised when Rayleigh grumpily assented, because this was Rayleigh they were talking about, and the day he was able to refuse a request from Roger was the day Rouge met a World Noble that didn’t want to kill her.

“Rouge!” shouted one of their crewmates one morning, coming up to her as she and Buggy were watering the dahlias on the main deck. He was a small man named Emit, and Rouge rather liked him because he mostly made decisions that made sense.

“Hm?” she asked, tilting her watering can in a practiced motion as she eyed Buggy, whose hand for this sort of thing was still slightly shaky.

“Well, uh, we tried to go to Captain Roger about this but he just started laughing, soo…” Emit sounded like he was probably wringing his hands nervously. “Uh.”

“Spit it out,” said Rouge.

“Well, we — that is, me and Adira — we were wondering if you could maybe please help resolve an argument we’ve been having?”

“Buggy, you’re going to drown those flowers if you just stand there, pay attention to where the water’s going,” admonished Rouge, nudging his shoulder until he moved the watering can. She cast a glance at Emit, who looked uncharacteristically embarrassed. “Go on.”

“Well, uh, see, I have this old spyglass that’s definitely mine, but she says she remembers finding it and that I stole it from her, and, uh, now we’re not talking which is kind of terrible because we bunk together, so…” Emit shuffled his feet.

Rouge just stared at him incredulously. “I don’t have time for sibling arguments, I have plants and budgeting to take care of.” To reinforce the point, she watered his boots. “The things I put up with on this ship!”

“Yeah! Rouge-san has better things to do than babysit you!” declared Buggy, marching up next to her and puffing out his chest.

Rouge just barely muffled a burst of laughter into silence, so as not to offend the miniature menace’s fragile pride. The things she did for people!

“Better things to do than babysit you, too,” she said when she had mostly recovered, bonking him lightly on the head with her near-empty watering can as she tried to keep amusement out of her tone. “Ten beri if you go refill this for me, greedy baby.”

He snatched it from her hand almost before he was done speaking and tore off to the kitchens, where hopefully Shanks was not. A vain hope.

Emit was still staring at her, so she made a shooing motion with her hand. “I have to go fertilize the marigolds,” she said. “Go bug Rayleigh, he’s in charge of children anyways.”

Rayleigh didn’t talk to Rouge for a week.

 

**3\. Rouge has a sense of self-preservation, thank you**

Roger announced that they were going to the Grand Line over breakfast, because he had always had a unique sense of timing. Rouge, her mouth full of smoked fish, refused immediately. She was not going anywhere near the Grand Line. That was her decision and she was sticking by it.

Now the only question was whether… yeah, dammit, he had already managed to convince the rest of the crew. Whatever deity decided to give that charisma to that reckless of a man was an idiot.

So, she cornered him and Rayleigh later that day, when she had finished checking the ship’s accounts against the supplies she suspected would be needed for the trip and the cooks’ latest shopping list requests, which were required to be submitted to her three days before they hit land.

They were on the upper deck, half-shaded by Rouge's stand of sunflowers, and Rouge had decided that the only way to do this was a lecture.

“There’s no way I’m going to the Grand Line, and there’s no way I’m losing you guys.” She frowned at Roger and Rayleigh in turn, and then for good measure at Shanks and Buggy, who were trying to murder each other over by the figurehead. “Yeah, yeah, you’re gonna die in three years Roger, whatever. I want you back here and in one piece before then. If you have to die, you’re doing it with everyone at your bedside, Captain, and that’s final.”

Rayleigh sighed in something that was close to defeat but not quite there.

Rouge opened her mouth to give him the necessary nudge, but Roger beat her to it.

“You’re sure?”

And Rouge almost, _almost_ relented then and there, because there was no trace in his expression of Roger’s usual casual confidence, that smile like he was challenging the world to do its worst and its weirdest gone like it had never been. He looked _vulnerable_ , in the way he only really let Rouge and Rayleigh see and even them only rarely, vulnerable and _scared_ and possessive in that charmingly ridiculous way he was of them all, but especially the two of them and the children.

But. But Rouge was a match for him in stubbornness and selfishness both, and she would not bow. Not on this matter. “I’m sure.”

“Rouge…” tried Rayleigh, who would follow Roger anywhere with no care for himself.

“If you let my flowers die I will gut you,” said Rouge to the sunflowers, avoiding Roger’s gaze and looking away from Rayleigh’s betrayed face entirely.

Then she turned on her heel and went to break down in private.

 

**4\. Rouge thinks you should support your local businesses**

Portgas D Rouge, beloved mayor of Hibiscus Town on the coast of Shone Island, stared down the Marine officers trying to detain her, gave them the finger, and tossed herself backwards out the window.

“You can't arresT THE MAYOR!” she shouted, as she plummeted three stories down.

Okay, let's back up a little.

When Rouge arrived in Hibiscus Town, a week or so after Roger dropped her off on an almost-uninhabited island nearby, she set up shop as the local florist and within a couple months was beloved enough to run for a council position in the local elections.

Hibiscus was on that weird blurry line between village and town, small enough to be mostly ignored by pirates and the World Government and large enough to actually need a local government more substantial than just an old fixture of a mayor. It was admittedly pretty easy to get on the council, if only because nobody else wanted to be there, and even easier to get Rouge’s specific responsibilities: she was in charge of foreign affairs by dint of the fact that she had been off Shone Island before and told good stories about it.

For the vast majority of people, that would have meant diplomacy. For Rouge, who had spent the past thirty years or more handing off all conflict-resolution tasks to Rayleigh and occasionally a dismayed Roger, it mostly meant having opinions in council meetings.

Within a couple more months people had mostly forgotten she had ever _not_ been there, arranging bouquets and making herself heard. She was personable, friendly, a good neighbor, and reasonably generous. Hibiscus had adopted her as its own.

Not long afterwards, the mayor was killed trying to bargain with an invading pirate crew, and Rouge, who had made a beautiful speech and provided flowers for the funeral, was appointed as provisional mayor, mostly because the rest of the council was catatonic with grief.

That she single-handedly repelled the entire pirate invasion probably helped, too.

Time wound on, the people of the town liked her enough that she kept her mayoral position, and a year and a half later found her pinning Roger’s new bounty to her office wall when there was a knock on the door.

“Come in!” she said, sticking in the last pin and turning to face three Marines. They blinked at her small bulletin board collection of posters and newspaper clippings chronicling the adventures of her captain and crew. She had always been able to pass it off as simple interest in the doings of the infamous Pirate King.

Still, this spelled trouble. She _liked_ Hibiscus town.

The Marine in the center cleared his throat. “Madam Mayor, we have information that you may be an associate of the notorious villain Gold Roger—”

“You’re saying his name wrong,” interrupted Rouge, sniffing and turning her head away as her worries evaporated in the face of irritation.

“Madam Mayor?”

“It’s Gol _D_ Roger, get it right,” she corrected. “He gets so annoyed how everyone messes it up.” She pointed at herself, and then at two random spots on the opposing wall. “Portgas _D_ Rouge. Gol _D_ Roger. Monkey _D_ Garp. It’s not that hard!”

“Um, alright, Madam Mayor, if you say so,” said the Marine, who clearly did not understand at all. Maybe Rouge should have gone over it again? “But because of this potential association — not that we wish to slander you of course, Madam! — we are required to take you in for questioning. If you do not resist, everything will— Madam!”

That last Madam was, of course, because Rouge had decided enough was enough, given him and his two non-speaking friends the finger, and launched herself backwards with a shower of crashing glass out the closed window.

A shout of “You can’t arresT THE MAYOR!” drifted up as she fell, and then they heard triumphant, almost cackling laughter, but all the Marines saw when they made their way to the shattered window was a pile of broken glass three stories down, and no body.

Rouge, naturally, was both smart and skilled enough to survive a three-story fall and escape Shone Island in a pre-prepared dinghy hidden in a cove for exactly this eventuality almost before the Marines got to the bottom of the stairs. She was not smart enough to not end up with glass shards embedded in her back, but you win some (chase scenes) you lose some (blood).

Conveniently, this was right around the time Roger disbanded the crew, so she met up with him on the other side of the Polestar Islands from Loguetown and Roger, to Rouge’s distinctly horrified shock, forcibly recruited some Sea Kings to pull them across the Calm Belts to South Blue.

“I _said_ I’d never go to the Grand Line, asshole,” she complained, sometime between fighting off a giant Sea King that looked like the bastard child of a flamingo and a carp and hugging him with all the strength she could muster.

He just grinned that grin at her and called it a shortcut.

 

**5\. Rouge is pregnant and it’s objectively horrible**

Roger and Rouge honeymooned on Baterilla, taking a last year of peace even as they felt acutely Rayleigh’s absence from their trio.

Then they made their Sea King-facilitated way back across the Calm Belts and a cross-section of the Grand Line, a rough trip not just because of Grand Line weather or the thought of their impending parting, but also because Rouge was _really_ done with this whole technically being in the Grand Line business. But, admittedly, it was mostly the impending parting.

Once they arrived, Roger went off to make a show of turning himself in while Rouge made her inconspicuous way to an island less than a day’s journey from Windmill Village because Monkey D Garp could not be counted on to understand subtlety.

She bought a house, under a fake name with no D as its centerpiece. She saved newspapers obsessively, scanning through them with a desperation she and Roger had developed on Baterilla for any hint that her former crewmates were doing alright. She developed an elaborate backstory for her fake identity, because at some point she had gotten accustomed to a life of action and didn’t know what to do with herself when there were no people to be exasperated by or accounts to be filed or enemies to fight off. Flowers could only be watered so much before they drowned.

And so she waited, and tended a garden of magnolia and hibiscus and morning glory, and established herself as the local florist again but this time she was the recluse with the house on the hill, and was no longer known for her smiles.

As it turned out, being pregnant was bad. Being pregnant for two years was the _worst_ , and Garp was not helping.

He came around for one of his irregular visits when she was sitting under the pair of ancient magnolia trees, weighing the pros and cons of trying to contact Rayleigh despite the danger. It had been the one-year anniversary of Roger’s execution a week before, and she had let her Will slip a little as she listened to the fireworks from the town below, her sudden dizzy stomachache as the embryo inside her was allowed to grow making a truth of the illness she had fabricated to avoid the festival.

Even a week later, she was still too woozy and out-of-sorts to fully reestablish the control she had had, and could feel the embryo developing, sluggishly and slower than would be natural but not at all the complete standstill she had imposed in those early panicked hours and maintained through sheer stubbornness. Her stomach wasn’t nearly big enough to be suspicious, but it was only a matter of time.

And _seas_ , she missed Roger and Rayleigh and. And everyone.

Selfish assholes, going off to the Grand Line and getting hunted by the whole world. Or maybe she was the selfish one, for staying behind.

When Garp arrived, he didn’t say anything for once, just handed her a bottle of sake as he went to go rummage in her house for cups. Invasive bastard. Didn't even ask permission.

“So, why’re you here?” said Rouge, more snipily than she’d really intended, when he finally back came out with the chipped trio of sake cups she kept in the back of the kitchen cupboard.

“Apology present,” he muttered, pouring sake for the two of them and Roger.

“Bullshit,” said Rouge, because he knew as well as she did that Garp had as many regrets as Roger and just a few less than her, which was as close to none as a person could get. And that Garp wasn’t even what had killed Roger in the first place.

He made a face at her. “Can’t a soon-to-be grandfather come visit his future grandchild every once in awhile?”

“ _Grandfather_?” Rouge made a face back at him. Roger bullshit and Garp bullshit were such similar flavors it was almost like she knew him as well as she knew Roger and Rayleigh. And that wasn’t a compliment.

“Well, yeah! You both asked me to take care of the baby, which means I’m its grandfather now, cause I already have a son, so I can’t be its father! Especially since that little brat Dragon’s already twenty. That’d just be weird, so your brat’ll just have to be my grandson.” Garp spoke with an air of finality and logic that his statement really did not deserve.

Rouge took a sip of sake and suggested, “You could just be the godfather?” If this was the sort of conversation they were going to be having, she needed the alcohol.

“Well I can’t be the grandfather and godfather at the same time, so no. Obviously.”

“Whatever,” said Rouge, abandoning the argument for the sake of not getting a headache. She took another sip of sake. “Well, whatever you’re here for, it’s good to see you. I think.”

Garp grinned at her, wide and bright in that way she knew from Roger and her own face in a mirror, and maybe—

Well, maybe she should have been sad, but even sitting with her ostensible enemy, all her friends scattered or dead, she found herself grinning back.

 

And when she died a year later, she died smiling, and with no regrets.

Well, one regret.

Seriously, Garp, _bandits_?

**Author's Note:**

> rouge, avid fan of supporting your local businesses (or stealing from them, as the case may be) is very proud of adult buggy’s small-time terrorism in the same way that roger, world's most dramatique pirate, is proud of shanks's status as an exalted emperor of the new world  
> rayleigh just has a headache and also is sad
> 
> (come talk to me on tumblr or twitter @grainjew !!! i like making new friends!!!)


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